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At the beginning of the year I posted a link to Mashable, reporting that Twitter’s traffic was failing to increase, and had for several months.

Wondering if this was still the case, I ran my own analysis – not of the traffic to Twitter (which only Twitter themselves can measure accurately), but of the number of user accounts on Twitter – over the two year period from 29th May ’08 – 29th May ’10

Interestingly, I saw the same slump in new signups that Mashable had spotted on Quantcast’s traffic stats – from July ’09 – Feb ’10.

Even more interestingly, I found that new users suddenly jumped from Feb 2010, and have been increasing ever since!

So what’s going on here?

When we first saw traffic going down, many of us suspected that Twitter may have been approaching market saturation (the point where all people who wanted to tweet already had accounts). This suspicion seems to have been wrong.

My suspicion now is that we’re seeing the effects of two loosely-coupled markets – one, smaller, market approaching saturation; another (larger) market where Twitter is beginning to take off.

I know we have some readers who know far more about such models than I do – I’d be really interested in hearing if anyone has a good model that could explain this behaviour.

And, for completeness, here’s a chart of how the total number of users on Twitter has changed over the past two years (note this includes inactive and banned accounts).

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 12:12 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.